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UK Police Raid Party After Seeing "All-Night" Tag On Facebook
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the police like to spend their time trawling our private information on Facebook looking for criminals. 'Riot police stormed a man's 30th birthday barbecue for 15 guests because it was advertised as an "all-night" party on Facebook. Four police cars, a riot van, and a force helicopter were dispatched to a privately-owned field in a small village near Sowton, Devon in the UK on Saturday, ordering the party shut down or everyone would be arrested. The birthday barbecue was busted up before they even had a chance to plug the music in, reports the BBC. It was about 4pm when eight officers with camouflage pants and body armor jumped out of their vehicles and ordered everyone out about an hour into the party.' The event's organizer, Andrew Poole, said, 'The police had full-on camouflage trousers on and body-armour, it was ridiculous. There were also several plain-clothes officers as well ... they kept on insisting it has been advertised it as an all-night rave on the internet. The times on it were put as "overnight" in case people wanted to sleep-over, but after being explained this they were still banging on saying it was advertised on the internet. They wouldn't accept it wasn't a rave. It was in a completely isolated field.'"
I guess everyone should put all night party tags on their Facebook pages tomorrow night.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Instead of keeping people you know to possibly be intoxicated confined to an event all night where they can only do harm to themselves (if even), let's break these gatherings up so some of these people get intoxicated elsewhere, and have to drive home early.
Raving is not a crime.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Must suck for those guys to live in a police state. Man am i ever glad to live in a free an democratic country.
Oh, wait...
...citation needed.
Just post it to facebook, the police will take care of the citation...
Did the owner of the field give informed consent for the gathering? If so, then the police had no business being there. Apologies are almost certainly in order.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
What's worse, even if it was a "rave" (*gag*) it technically shouldn't have been illegal. While ravers and raves are probably one of humanity's least finest inventions there's nothing inherently wrong with listening and dancing to shitty techno (a redundancy?), waving around glowsticks like a fruitcake, and taking a drug that hurts no one 'cept yourself. Ravers in all their idiocy are like modern retardo hippies; it's not like raves are an assembly of violent people. The root of this all is the War on Drugs.
So it's doubly-wrong.
(sorry for any possible ravers that read this, 'though I suspect most ravers don't know how to read)
'Had it gone ahead, it is likely that far more of our resources would have been used to police the event and there would have been considerable disruption to neighbouring properties.
That's from a spokeswoman of the police there.
I mean seriously, you're gonna say that because it's easier to make people stop doing something that you have suspicion it might be illegal it's better to mess up a tax paying citizen's freedom?
To loosely quote Sam Vimes of Discworld, "It's better to say we caught the guy what done it instead of saying we caught the guy who looked like he'd do it. Especially when they say, Prove it."
Also...
'It was fortunate that the force helicopter was able to fly over the site as they were returning from another task.'
Really. In the same article the spokewoman says that it cost them 200 pounds to deploy the helicopter for 20 minutes. The birthday boy spent 800 pounds to get his party RUINED by the police. Fuck you guys, seriously. What the fuck.
Frankly I am old enough and bitter enough to just want kids like that off my lawn, my neighboors lawn, and if they are loud enough, the field next to it as well for that matter.
From BBC news - "But local people, fearing a rave was going to take place after previous events with loud music at the same premises, alerted the police."
In other words, this bunch were notorious around town for partying all through the night, playing loud music and generally being a pain in the ass to everybody else. They may have been just barbequeing when the police showed up, but the locals knew what was comming and decided enough was enough.
The actual legislation if anyone's interested.
As reported by the Register, police can break up a rave party under section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act since 1994. And it is not for any kind of music festivals... No, no, no, only raves: "playing amplified music wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats during the night".
Yeah, I have neighbors who do the whole "BBQ" thing. They like to stay up "barbecuing" until about 4:30 a.m., and one of them in particular likes to rap an entire song's worth of memorized rap lyrics in a loud monotone for several minutes at a time.
Now, I don't want camouflaged police showing up, but when I call the cops and these guys demand to know "which neighbor was it?" and STILL don't shut up after the cops are gone, I have to think that somebody with a Facebook account and a field is probably driving his neighbors FREAKING insane.
Thank goodness for my linux box and synths that can play a nice loud PSHHHHHHTTTT sound, brown or pink as you like it. (Had to work linux in there somehow)
High ranking police all over the planet have built beuracratic kingdoms around the idiotic idea of declaring war on a social problem. In the US where this moronic idea came from it costs $100 billion/year to police just pot alone, yes $100 BILLION every YEAR just to stop people smoking pot. $10 billion of that goes directly to the DEA who LOBBY legislatures to keep the status quo. One american is arrested and has their life ruined every 18 seconds just for smoking pot. UK, Australia, etc, are no different.
Oh, please. The entire DEA budget is only $1.9B, so I kind of doubt they spend $10B a year just on pot prevention. And where is the other $90B coming from? /rolleyes
Facts - your new best friend: http://www.usdoj.gov/jmd/2010summary/pdf/dea-bud-summary.pdf
Sure, there's other things like the National Drug Information Center, and the ICDE, but their total budget is penny change, maybe $0.5B or so.
I love hyperbole as much as the next guy, but seriously, being off by two orders of magnitude is just ignorant.
>>No, no, no, only raves: "playing amplified music wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats during the night".
Interesting law. It specifies that it applies to people regardless of if they're trespassing, so they can be used to order people off their land, as long as a superintendent of the police thinks that 2 or more people are "making preparations" to hold a rave there.
If they don't leave their own land, a constable can arrest them without a warrant.
Crazy times.
However, it does define a rave as a nighttime party of 100 or more people, and I think the 15 dudes BBQing under a tent during the afternoon doesn't look much like a nighttime rave. The police were acting against the law.
private information on Facebook
Idiots think putting information on internet is private.....
>>Too bad it's from the government so his conspiracy-theory-addled mind will never accept it.
Yeah... he's got a crackpot notion that our federal government has nothing better to do than pour billions of dollars into wasteful programs that won't make a lick of difference. What a nutjob, eh?
Eh?
He'd rented a sound system for 17 friends in a field? Well, I'm not going to judge before all the facts are in, but it seems a little excessive. And considering that local residents had complained about raves in the area before, it seems a little suspect.
However, the fact that the police shut down the party before they had anything more than suspicion is still wrong, I think. If they had the guys assurances that it wasn't a rave, wouldn't it have been enough just to send someone back at 8PM and someone at midnight?
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
This garbage really pisses me off. The next time one of you whiny little maggots start crying about how some criminal got off the hook and you start to say "We should have 'tougher laws' to fix this", think about this story... this is what "tougher laws" get you... a super uptight nit-picking police force that busts up a RUTTIN' BIRTHDAY PARTY because it used the "wrong words" in the invitation.
Probably arrested under the Criminal Justice Bill.
I went on two London marches to fight against this bill 15 years ago. They were determined to stop us having free parties, "Illegal Raves" as the media called them. No conveys of more than 6 cars, no parties in fields, no freedom to enjoy life without corporate involvement. In my eyes, this is where CCTV Britain started. This was the start of anti-social laws. The nanny state.
These parties still go on though. Fuck the police.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
read that again... breathe... there.... you got it, champ.
step one to being a successful "criminal": don't advertize whatever illegal stuff you're going to do...
and no, facebook is not private...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
and I think the 15 dudes BBQing under a tent during the afternoon doesn't look much like a nighttime rave. The police were acting against the law.
This is where the part making preparations comes in play. From the face of it the law is pretty much on the police's side. They see some people setting up a tent, building up music equipment, arranging some catering - there you go, looks just like preparations for a rave party.
And of course ravers are very scary, extremely dangerous and highly aggressive people who are likely to be totally high on whatever drug is in fashion nowadays which is why there is clearly a need for a helicopter, body armour, and the rest. (/sarcasm)
1) The police didn't scour facebook - locals did, saw it, and reported it as a rave.
2) The helicopter was out anyway, and they just asked the helicopter to fly over the site to really check if there was a party on its way back
It was not police scouring facebook and dispatching a helicopter.
It embarrasses and annoys me that this happened in my own country, which I do love dearly, but I wont let the usual anti-UK/US/Australia facebook crowd exaggerate it further.
You see a lot of kiddies complaining along the lines of "a rave shouldn't be illegal". But in britain, it is. Yes, really. Not concerts or parties, but raves.
The reasons are probably that overtime raves became a problem for some and they wanted something done against them. The other side was not intrested in fighting it and so things got passed into law and voila, you got a specific type of party made illegal.
England, believe it or not is still democracy. More so now then in the last couple of decades because it is no longer ensured who is going to win an election in a region. Safe seats aren't that safe anymore.
If YOU don't fight for your rights, then someone else wins with their rights. The problem with raves is simple, it is the struggle between the neighbours who want a quiet night and the party people who don't. Both have rights but they can't both excersise them fully without restricting the other.
So either the ravers turn down the music or the neighbours give up their quiet night. Ideally, both sides should work this out but as you can see on this side, working things out ain't part of human nature. The anti rave laws have come into being to deal with "illegal" events being held at random location with absolutely no care being given for the consequences. This doesn't just upset the neighbours, it upsets others in the entertainment industry. Not entirely fair is it that a local pub has to spend a fortune on sound isolation but a random group can just hold a rave anywhere, break every law that exists, not pay taxes and get away with it?
The law didn't come into place because YOU played techno in your yard and the neighbour complained. It came into being from 1000+ parties being held in location with no fire safety, no securty, causing serious disturbances. Not just noise, but traffic and things like fights breaking out.
The ravers suffered the public wrath and did NOT regulate themselves to fit into society. Of course, that is not a rebel thing to do but it is the thing to do if you don't want society to turn against you. Because as silly as this story is, the average voter (that is people who actually do vote, not just people who can vote) doesn't give a shit. They just see the tabloids depiction of ravers as crazed druggies, heared from someone at work how a rave is a warzone and are all in favor.
Democracy is just another word for dictatorship of the many. The raves that got out of control created these laws, which weren't oppososed by the ravers themselves and now you got this silly situation.
Most laws are silly, but exist because people are silly. If a lot of rave parties didn't cause such a nuisance (you could hold a rave party the same as any other concert and follow laws of fire safety, drugs laws and noise pollution) then there would be no desire to have them restricted. There are laws that says you can't drill into your wall after or before a specific hour in a building that isn't standalone. Why? Because someone found it neccesary to drill all night in an apartment block. Well not SOMEONE. A LOT of someone's. The apartment block is actually a good example, an old flat might easily have several hundred of apartments and drilling in one sound through the entire building. If a person only drill once every 3 years, it takes less then 1000 people to have drilling going on day in day out.
That is the reason there are rave laws and lots of others. Because without them people just can't be consider the affect their action have on others.
Want to protest that? Then don't say "it shouldn't be illegal". You should made sure when the laws were introduced that it didn't become illegal by doing the same thing the petitioners did. Make your case and show that YOUR case benefits the greater good (gets the most people to vote for you).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Not that I think your figures on the DEA budget are wrong, but stopping folks from smoking pot involves a lot of additional enforcement costs shouldered by local police, border patrol, coast guard and the courts. The DEA typically, though not always, spends their budget going after growers and trafficers and in the process they utilize a lot of local resources.
When you consider the cost of that local utilization, the cost of jailing these non-violent offenders, the costs incurred in public defense, prosecution and lost productivity (in the courts and in the lives of those being tried) - I'd be inclined to think it's much closer to 100B nationally than to 1.9B - still hyperbole but not just hand-waving.
I'd honestly be interested in seeing what those costs total out to nationally but I'd doubt there are numbers that would allow for a decent projection of those costs as they relate to marijuana and not all drugs combined.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
One american is arrested and has their life ruined every 18 seconds just for smoking pot.
Really?
Who is this person? It must be awful for them to have their life ruined every 18 seconds.
Since Thatcher took exception to the actual all-night raves that went on in the early nineties. ...
Mrs Thatcher had been out of power for 4 years when that bill went through Parliament.
Guess you were too busy popping pills at those all night parties to notice though ;P
Check this - in the USA they use police that look like the military, the whole guns and armour thing to break up their parties... so looks like its the same both sides of the pond.
Thatcher did this, four years after she left office the prime minister's office (1990), and two years after she left parliament (1992)?
Really? Because everyone else is blaming a 1994 law. John Major (1990-1997), also of the conservative party, was the prime minister when this law passed, but you don't even mention him. Tony Blair took the reins in 1997.
Perhaps with all the citations and links you could have at least made sure your leading claim lined up with some dates. All your grand ideas about 'government approved this' and 'capitalist that' seemed like the drug-induced foggy ravings of someone who doesn't even have their dates right.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
While its true that recent governments seem to have lost a sense of what is "reasonable fun" I think that is only part of it. With the UKs increasing population and the decreasing cost of amplifiers part of the issue is that parties are now loud enough and frequent enough to disturb far more people than before.
What troubles me more with this is not that the police turned up in force (everyone makes mistakes) but that they persisted in shutting down the party once it was explained to them what was happening. What happened to reasonable policing and a little trust? Take the guy's details if needed and if it did turn into a rave then at least you would know who was responsible. The police are supposed to use discretion when using their powers. Examples like this make us remove and restrict those police powers and that means that when they really do need them they won't have them available.
Some guy posted an event on Facebook to have a drink on a public square here in Ghent (Belgium). The event was marked as 'open', and on the proposed evening, not really expected, hundreds of people showed up on the square with bottles of booze.
The reaction of the mayor wasn't to break up the party, but instead to send a team to place extra garbage bins and a handful of cops to keep an eye on things. They looked up the original poster of the event, had a talk with the guy and eventually even dropped their idea of charging him for the extra costs and paid it with city money.
Gave a good feeling that there are still governments left with a sense of humor.
Oh, please. The entire DEA budget is only $1.9B, so I kind of doubt they spend $10B a year just on pot prevention. And where is the other $90B coming from? /rolleyes
Facts - your new best friend: http://www.usdoj.gov/jmd/2010summary/pdf/dea-bud-summary.pdf [usdoj.gov]
Makes you wonder how they can afford those spiffy jackets and caps.
It became illegal about 15 years ago - from TFA, it states Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. This basically criminalised raves (which at the time were being demonised from hysteria and moral panicing from the tabloids and the politicians), even if they are held on legal ground.
AFAICT, it criminalises any gathering of over 100 people in a public place where music is played (defined infamously as "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats"), unless they have obtained the appropriate entertainment licence, but furthermore, any it allows the police to disperse any gathering of 2 or more people if the police think they're preparing a rave, or 10 or more people if the police think they're waiting for a rave.
No evidence, no courts, no right to appeal.
Of course, the police deserve criticism for applying the law in a case that was clearly not in its original spirit, but let's not remember the law they used to do it is broad and draconian. The worrying thing is that the police haven't backed down and acknowledged it as a mistake - they still believe that anything advertised on the Internet as an "all-night party" should be illegal. What is this, a curfew? Telling us when bed time is? Talk about nanny-state - it's like the strict rules my college used to have about parties, where you needed permission, and parties had to be over by midnight.
From TFA, the polic: "far more resources would have been used to police the event". In my experience of Cambridge's Strawberry Fair, these resources would predominantly have involved the police doing a fishing expedition in order to catch people with cannabis on them (I experienced this first hand when travelling through Cambridge Train Station that day - even though I wasn't going to the fair, every single person getting off the train that day was detained for about 30 minutes for stop and search for drugs).
On one hand, we have a government that is entirely too willing to "Control and Defend" (what ever happened to "serve and protect"?) and on the other hand, we have short-sighted people who are all too willing to request and expect such things from government.
It was "the locals" who contacted the authorities to have this birthday party cancelled according to the articles. (I wonder how much we can trust the articles to actually be telling the truth in this matter?) If this is true, then "we have only ourselves to blame" in that we are begging government to protect us from just about everything.
No amount of any single thing will back this problem out. Soccer moms and elderly don't give a rat's ass about freedom and self expression. They want the world to change for them, not the other way around. And I have to admit that I have my own "the world offends me" perspective from time to time... especially when I am driving and the person in the passing lane is moving too slow and I get blocked in by two or more drivers who don't seem to notice or care that they are impeding traffic. (There are those moments when I actually wish I could slap a police light on my car, whip out a badge and a gun and get crazy on their asses... but at just about that moment, I remember that this is exactly why I don't own any guns -- I might use them! And frankly, I know I'd have much to regret if I ever did.) I can identify with the world offending me in any case, but here's what I do about it:
I try, as often as possible, that in order to protect my own rights, I have to make allowances for and respect the rights of others and that [especially] includes the right to be DIFFERENT. I think that somehow, the world of people at large has forgotten that when you try to take the rights of "some people" away, you invariably harm the rights of ALL people. Perhaps I am showing my age, but there was a time when we taught this sort of wisdom in schools... civics or social studies... not sure what they might be called today, but it seems pretty obvious to me that people of my age, older and younger either never had such classes or didn't learn from them.
But here I sit with a real problem. Because I am in the clear minority in this position as are many slashdotters who probably agree with me. On this issue, the need to see that rights are to be protected and respected for ALL or NONE, I am a member of a minority group. The rest of the people don't understand or even care about their rights and freedoms. I want the world to change for me... but really, for us all... but primarily, for me.
You should read a bit of history, matey. "Never had any kind of revolution or defining moment"... "never had to struggle to get (freedom and liberty)"....
Take a bit of time out to read some history and you might find out why you've got the right to vote, what habeus corpus is, why we we're allowed to move from parish to parish without getting permission from our lords and a whole lot more.
He can make a complaint to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. A department so independent it's run by a bunch of policemen.
I think everyone misses the point that no law is impossible to change or remove.
So blaming John Major even after Blair elected and did nothing about it doesn't make any sense.
I would be just like Obama, keeping Guantanamo open even with more torture and blaming W. Bush for Guantanamo while he can easily close it down. (which he did or something)
http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/news/Sowton-party-man-s-anger-police/article-1171221-detail/article.html
Video of British police breaking up a party due to excessive music. The incident occurs at around the 55 second mark.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Good grief!
I think making sure a rave is safe is a good idea, after what happened to the people with the lasers a while back, but otherwise, what's the harm?
NONE, ZERO, NADA.
Between the US and UK, what the fuck is going on?
Blogging because I can...
Time to fire up the theremin, we're gonna party!
FrankN